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Christian View of God and the World - Enhanced Version
In 1886 Joan Kerr donated 3,000 pounds to the Scottish United Presbyterian Synod to sponsor a series of lectures on Christian history, ethics, doctrine, and worldview. The lecturer position was given to James Orr, and The Christian View of God and the World was published as a transcript of the lecture series. Orr's lectures covered topics such as general Christian worldview, the alternatives to Christianity, postulates about God's existence and sin, and the incarnation of Christ. The spoken nature of these lectures gives the text an understandable, conversational tone to even the heaviest theology. Orr is one of the best-known English-speaking theologians, and his brilliant mind produced a number of great works. These spoken lectures have a different feel than his prose, and fans of Orr will appreciate the new tone.
Abby Zwart
CCEL Staff Writer
This edition features an artistic cover, a new promotional introduction, an index of scripture references, links for scripture references to the appropriate passages, and a hierarchical table of contents which makes it possible to navigate to any part of the book with a minimum of page turns.
Abby Zwart
CCEL Staff Writer
This edition features an artistic cover, a new promotional introduction, an index of scripture references, links for scripture references to the appropriate passages, and a hierarchical table of contents which makes it possible to navigate to any part of the book with a minimum of page turns.
- GenresPhilosophy
642 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 1897
18 people are currently reading
96 people want to read
About the author
James Orr
14.5k books11 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
Scottish Presbyterian minister and theologian.
Scottish Presbyterian minister and theologian.
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September 24, 2022
A book I purchased in 1993 after hearing of it in various lectures I attended that addressed the topic of worldviews and Christianity. These were mainly a series at St Andrew's Church in north Oxford, maybe in 1991, some of which were given by Alister McGrath. The book was formerly part of the library of Latimer House in Oxford, so it does seem appropriate to have read it after my return to the city!
James Orr was a professor of theology in the United Presbyterian Church (UPC) in Victorian Scotland. This denomination was an amalgamation of various groups which had separated from the Church of Scotland in the Eighteenth Century. It went on to merge with the Free Church of Scotland in the early 1900s, a step Orr supported. One thing he is famous for is introducing the concept of 'worldview' into English language theology. Hence my interest in reading this book.
Orr is perhaps best known for having edited a series of books on key Christian doctrines in the 1910s called The Fundamentals, written in response to theological liberalism, and which gave their name to Fundamentalism as a movement. It would, though, be a mistake to imbue Orr with holding to all that term means today. He was post-, not pre-, millennial, he was also a theistic evolutionist, more on which below.
Ironically it was the adoption of liberal theology by the teaching staff at the UPC seminary, and the subsequent weakening of confessional subscription to require adherence only to the substance of the Confession's doctrine in the Declaratory Act, that was the downfall of evangelical presbyterianism in Scotland. This step was soon followed by the Free Church of Scotland (leading firstly to the secession of the Free Presbyterians and then the Free Church of Scotland, as we know it today, when the merger took place.) Both denominations were weakened at the core by having failed to discipline seminary staff who had fallen to liberal ideas often whilst pursuing higher studies in Germany.
This is the context in which Orr gave a series of lectures at the UPC seminary in 1890-91. He principally interacts with German liberal theology. Indeed, other than a couple of reference to Charles Hodge, it seems peculiar that he draws little or nothing explicitly from orthodox reformed writers. This does give a flavour of the theological environment of the time and, perhaps, how the orthodox were mostly struggling to produce material countering liberalism. Ironically most of the liberals he interacts with, bar a few exceptions such as Ritschl, Strauss and Scheleirmacher, are wholly unknown and unread today (actually that's probably true of those one has heard of too).
The book itself contains nine lectures, most with appendices on topics he could not cover at the time, and ninety pages of notes in a tiny font which are actually mini essays on theological subjects touched on in the main lectures, and so worth reading also.
Orr starts by introducing the concept of a Christian worldview. In an appendix he sets out the elements of this showing how Christian doctrine to answer the why, whence and whither of existence. This is, perhaps, a narrower use of worldview than is now common, as it is more concerned with philosophical coherence than the emotions, influences and frankly, incoherent motives that drive the individuals we meet. He sees Christianity as the higher truth which is the synthesis and completion of all other theories. In this he gives greater credence than I would to the capacity of fallen man to recognise and reason to Christianity as true, and also that there are genuine conflicts with other worldviews that cannot be synthesised into Christianity. That said, he is clear that knowing the truth is a matter of Divine revelation.
Next he considers the Christian view of who Christ is and the alternatives. That Christ is the true incarnation of the divine with a human nature is central to his analysis. All other theologies fail to account for who Jesus was and what he did. Attempting an intermediate position ends in humanitarianism, the idea that Christ was merely an exalted man, or agnosticism and merely natural religion, or pessimism in the form of atheism or pantheism as man gropes, on his own, for meaning. This loses any rational basis for the universe which can only be reclaimed via Theistic revelation that leads to Christ.
The first theistic postulate is that there is a God who is living, personal, ethical, self-revealing and infinite. He seeks to show the compatibility of this with evolutionist thought. It explains why the world is rational, the fundamental assumption of the scientific method. Likewise there is a moral order as a result of God's placing the works of the law in men's hearts. He turns to the various traditional theistic proofs to show that they retain validity and support that belief in God is rational.
In considering the teleological proof (the argument from design) he discusses evolutionary theory. (And here we should learn to be somewhat wary of attaching infallibility to the scientific theories of our day.) Unaware of the astonishing biological and genetic detail of organic life, he is persuaded by the theory of natural selection. Irreducible complexity is not on his radar. He favours an inner power of organisms to develop, to adjust to their environment and to weed out the weak and unfit. From he concludes there is thought in the world both in the process and ends of evolution.
The second theistic postulate is that man is made in the image of God. Man is fallen, and can be Spiritually renewed. He is the highest point of creation. Introducing consciousness to man can only have been achieved via a break in the evolutionary process. Man is a self-conscious, personal, rational moral being able to enter moral relations with his fellow men and with his Creator. This view opposes man as merely material. He is also spiritual with a soul that survives death. Nearly every society has a belief in the afterlife. Our desires go beyond our present existence, we push against imperfections of all kinds and the hope of eternity motivates our best actions.
The third postulate is that there is sin and moral evil in the world. Sin is what ought not to be, involving a revolt of a creature against his creator. Sin has a volitional cause at the root of our race and it has affected the development of mankind ever after. It is not a natural necessity from which we ascend to moral life and civilisation by our own effort. These other views, having a defective understanding of the origin of sin, are also defective in what they regard as salvation from it. The challenge for evolution is that, although it has a place for natural evil and pain, it has no place or basis for moral evil. Only Christianity explains why the death of man is unnatural and abnormal and offers a redemption of the whole man, body and soul.
Orr then returns to why Christ must be both God and man. The incarnation is the central assertion of Christianity and is the clear assertion of Scripture. Liberal theories fail to account for scriptural testimony.
The incarnation points to God as Triune. This impacts how we understand God's self-consciousness, his love, Fatherhood and relation to the world.
Penultimately the incarnation is linked to redemption from sin. Set aside as defective views of Jesus as only a great religious teacher and preacher of righteousness; or a great religious and social reformer; or a great philanthropist, caring for the bodies and souls of men; or as inculcating a new 'enthusiasm for humanity'; or a teacher with a new ethical secret for humanity; or as the spiritual Head of humanity aiming to lift mankind to new spiritual attainment and the goal of its perfection. Christ is all this but he is infinitely more and he achieves all by redemption in a sacrificial death. This centres on the atonement, the greatness of which is more than any of our theories about it. Most modern treatments soften the judicial aspects. Theories tend to focus on either the restoral of fellowship with God, breaking down the sinner's enmity to God or the removal of guilt. The New Testament foregrounds the expiatory and propitiatory nature of Christ's sacrifice. Failure to understand this leads to erroneous ideas of justification in both Schleiermacher (implanting a seed of holiness) and Ritschl (removal of our feeling of guilt). Atonement and guilt must be connected and this is achieved by seeing Christ's death as penal.
Christ 'alone could enter, on the one hand, into the meaning of the sin of the world; on the other, into a realisation of all that was due to that sin from God, not minimising either the sin or the righteousness, but doing justice to both, upholding righteousness, yet opening to the world the gates of a forgiving mercy. In him we see that done which we could not do; we see that brought which we could not bring; we see that reparation made to a broken law which we could not make; we see, at the same time, a righteousness consummated we long to make our own, a victory over the world we long to share, a will of love we long to have reproduced in ourselves, a grandeur of self-sacrifice we long to imitate. And, appropriating that sacrifice, not only in its atoning merit, but in its inward spirit, we know ourselves redeemed and reconciled.' Amen.
The last lecture looks at the incarnation and human destiny. All worldviews have their eschatologies. Christians are to be conformed to Christ, with glorious bodies like his, in a future event. Contrary to universalistic and annihilastionistic views there is an eternal Hell for the wicked. The lecture ends with what now seems a painfully ambitious hope that Christ's religion would ride in safety the waves of present-day unbelief. This, as Orr's compatriots were hurtling down the slope of liberalism with the carnage of two world wars ahead. And yet, with a more careful optimism, we do believe Christ's church will be seen triumphant though the passage will be stormy and at times we may fail to see the ark amidst the storm. Though our own land may look barren, we will see God at work around the world in marvellous ways.
A final appendix provides the bones of a tenth lecture that Orr could not fit into his allotted nine on the idea of the kingdom of God. This is a pity as the bones have some meat on them, and this is a concept which has been developed and used a great deal in the last century, though not always with clarity. It is the reign of God in human hearts and society and is used in Scripture sometimes as the reign of God himself, or the sphere of its dominion, which may be over the individual, all believers visibly or invisibly or humanity as whole under the influence of God's work.
In Christ's teaching the believer is placed in the kingdom but the manifestation of it is mainly eschatological. Christ speaks not at all about the effects of his teaching on culture, philosophy, literature or science. But his teaching will affect the wider culture. Christ presupposes the truth of the Old Testament and the world, in its present form, does not belong to his kingdom. Yet there are connections between his kingdom and society via reflections of divine relationships in human institutions, so God's fatherhood in human parentage, his dominion in the authority of the state.
To sum up, a thoughtful, challenging and historically important book, if now dated in the opponents it challenged, and limited in that its helpful theological developments have been taken further by others. Probably of most help to those with an interest in historical theology and as a starting point for developing ongoing rebuttals of classic German liberal theology. The church at large should be thankful to God for the life and labours of James Orr.
James Orr was a professor of theology in the United Presbyterian Church (UPC) in Victorian Scotland. This denomination was an amalgamation of various groups which had separated from the Church of Scotland in the Eighteenth Century. It went on to merge with the Free Church of Scotland in the early 1900s, a step Orr supported. One thing he is famous for is introducing the concept of 'worldview' into English language theology. Hence my interest in reading this book.
Orr is perhaps best known for having edited a series of books on key Christian doctrines in the 1910s called The Fundamentals, written in response to theological liberalism, and which gave their name to Fundamentalism as a movement. It would, though, be a mistake to imbue Orr with holding to all that term means today. He was post-, not pre-, millennial, he was also a theistic evolutionist, more on which below.
Ironically it was the adoption of liberal theology by the teaching staff at the UPC seminary, and the subsequent weakening of confessional subscription to require adherence only to the substance of the Confession's doctrine in the Declaratory Act, that was the downfall of evangelical presbyterianism in Scotland. This step was soon followed by the Free Church of Scotland (leading firstly to the secession of the Free Presbyterians and then the Free Church of Scotland, as we know it today, when the merger took place.) Both denominations were weakened at the core by having failed to discipline seminary staff who had fallen to liberal ideas often whilst pursuing higher studies in Germany.
This is the context in which Orr gave a series of lectures at the UPC seminary in 1890-91. He principally interacts with German liberal theology. Indeed, other than a couple of reference to Charles Hodge, it seems peculiar that he draws little or nothing explicitly from orthodox reformed writers. This does give a flavour of the theological environment of the time and, perhaps, how the orthodox were mostly struggling to produce material countering liberalism. Ironically most of the liberals he interacts with, bar a few exceptions such as Ritschl, Strauss and Scheleirmacher, are wholly unknown and unread today (actually that's probably true of those one has heard of too).
The book itself contains nine lectures, most with appendices on topics he could not cover at the time, and ninety pages of notes in a tiny font which are actually mini essays on theological subjects touched on in the main lectures, and so worth reading also.
Orr starts by introducing the concept of a Christian worldview. In an appendix he sets out the elements of this showing how Christian doctrine to answer the why, whence and whither of existence. This is, perhaps, a narrower use of worldview than is now common, as it is more concerned with philosophical coherence than the emotions, influences and frankly, incoherent motives that drive the individuals we meet. He sees Christianity as the higher truth which is the synthesis and completion of all other theories. In this he gives greater credence than I would to the capacity of fallen man to recognise and reason to Christianity as true, and also that there are genuine conflicts with other worldviews that cannot be synthesised into Christianity. That said, he is clear that knowing the truth is a matter of Divine revelation.
Next he considers the Christian view of who Christ is and the alternatives. That Christ is the true incarnation of the divine with a human nature is central to his analysis. All other theologies fail to account for who Jesus was and what he did. Attempting an intermediate position ends in humanitarianism, the idea that Christ was merely an exalted man, or agnosticism and merely natural religion, or pessimism in the form of atheism or pantheism as man gropes, on his own, for meaning. This loses any rational basis for the universe which can only be reclaimed via Theistic revelation that leads to Christ.
The first theistic postulate is that there is a God who is living, personal, ethical, self-revealing and infinite. He seeks to show the compatibility of this with evolutionist thought. It explains why the world is rational, the fundamental assumption of the scientific method. Likewise there is a moral order as a result of God's placing the works of the law in men's hearts. He turns to the various traditional theistic proofs to show that they retain validity and support that belief in God is rational.
In considering the teleological proof (the argument from design) he discusses evolutionary theory. (And here we should learn to be somewhat wary of attaching infallibility to the scientific theories of our day.) Unaware of the astonishing biological and genetic detail of organic life, he is persuaded by the theory of natural selection. Irreducible complexity is not on his radar. He favours an inner power of organisms to develop, to adjust to their environment and to weed out the weak and unfit. From he concludes there is thought in the world both in the process and ends of evolution.
The second theistic postulate is that man is made in the image of God. Man is fallen, and can be Spiritually renewed. He is the highest point of creation. Introducing consciousness to man can only have been achieved via a break in the evolutionary process. Man is a self-conscious, personal, rational moral being able to enter moral relations with his fellow men and with his Creator. This view opposes man as merely material. He is also spiritual with a soul that survives death. Nearly every society has a belief in the afterlife. Our desires go beyond our present existence, we push against imperfections of all kinds and the hope of eternity motivates our best actions.
The third postulate is that there is sin and moral evil in the world. Sin is what ought not to be, involving a revolt of a creature against his creator. Sin has a volitional cause at the root of our race and it has affected the development of mankind ever after. It is not a natural necessity from which we ascend to moral life and civilisation by our own effort. These other views, having a defective understanding of the origin of sin, are also defective in what they regard as salvation from it. The challenge for evolution is that, although it has a place for natural evil and pain, it has no place or basis for moral evil. Only Christianity explains why the death of man is unnatural and abnormal and offers a redemption of the whole man, body and soul.
Orr then returns to why Christ must be both God and man. The incarnation is the central assertion of Christianity and is the clear assertion of Scripture. Liberal theories fail to account for scriptural testimony.
The incarnation points to God as Triune. This impacts how we understand God's self-consciousness, his love, Fatherhood and relation to the world.
Penultimately the incarnation is linked to redemption from sin. Set aside as defective views of Jesus as only a great religious teacher and preacher of righteousness; or a great religious and social reformer; or a great philanthropist, caring for the bodies and souls of men; or as inculcating a new 'enthusiasm for humanity'; or a teacher with a new ethical secret for humanity; or as the spiritual Head of humanity aiming to lift mankind to new spiritual attainment and the goal of its perfection. Christ is all this but he is infinitely more and he achieves all by redemption in a sacrificial death. This centres on the atonement, the greatness of which is more than any of our theories about it. Most modern treatments soften the judicial aspects. Theories tend to focus on either the restoral of fellowship with God, breaking down the sinner's enmity to God or the removal of guilt. The New Testament foregrounds the expiatory and propitiatory nature of Christ's sacrifice. Failure to understand this leads to erroneous ideas of justification in both Schleiermacher (implanting a seed of holiness) and Ritschl (removal of our feeling of guilt). Atonement and guilt must be connected and this is achieved by seeing Christ's death as penal.
Christ 'alone could enter, on the one hand, into the meaning of the sin of the world; on the other, into a realisation of all that was due to that sin from God, not minimising either the sin or the righteousness, but doing justice to both, upholding righteousness, yet opening to the world the gates of a forgiving mercy. In him we see that done which we could not do; we see that brought which we could not bring; we see that reparation made to a broken law which we could not make; we see, at the same time, a righteousness consummated we long to make our own, a victory over the world we long to share, a will of love we long to have reproduced in ourselves, a grandeur of self-sacrifice we long to imitate. And, appropriating that sacrifice, not only in its atoning merit, but in its inward spirit, we know ourselves redeemed and reconciled.' Amen.
The last lecture looks at the incarnation and human destiny. All worldviews have their eschatologies. Christians are to be conformed to Christ, with glorious bodies like his, in a future event. Contrary to universalistic and annihilastionistic views there is an eternal Hell for the wicked. The lecture ends with what now seems a painfully ambitious hope that Christ's religion would ride in safety the waves of present-day unbelief. This, as Orr's compatriots were hurtling down the slope of liberalism with the carnage of two world wars ahead. And yet, with a more careful optimism, we do believe Christ's church will be seen triumphant though the passage will be stormy and at times we may fail to see the ark amidst the storm. Though our own land may look barren, we will see God at work around the world in marvellous ways.
A final appendix provides the bones of a tenth lecture that Orr could not fit into his allotted nine on the idea of the kingdom of God. This is a pity as the bones have some meat on them, and this is a concept which has been developed and used a great deal in the last century, though not always with clarity. It is the reign of God in human hearts and society and is used in Scripture sometimes as the reign of God himself, or the sphere of its dominion, which may be over the individual, all believers visibly or invisibly or humanity as whole under the influence of God's work.
In Christ's teaching the believer is placed in the kingdom but the manifestation of it is mainly eschatological. Christ speaks not at all about the effects of his teaching on culture, philosophy, literature or science. But his teaching will affect the wider culture. Christ presupposes the truth of the Old Testament and the world, in its present form, does not belong to his kingdom. Yet there are connections between his kingdom and society via reflections of divine relationships in human institutions, so God's fatherhood in human parentage, his dominion in the authority of the state.
To sum up, a thoughtful, challenging and historically important book, if now dated in the opponents it challenged, and limited in that its helpful theological developments have been taken further by others. Probably of most help to those with an interest in historical theology and as a starting point for developing ongoing rebuttals of classic German liberal theology. The church at large should be thankful to God for the life and labours of James Orr.
March 23, 2014
Tough, long read, but full of insightful analysis.
March 2, 2012
The first major attempt at a Christian worldview. Still a classic.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews